My impression is that 2 and 4 are relatively cruxy for some people? Especially 2.
IE I’ve heard from some academics that the “natural” thing to do is to join with the AI ethics crowd/Social Justice crowd and try to get draconian anti tech/anti AI regulations passed. My guess is their inside view beliefs are some combination of:
A. Current tech companies are uniquely good at AI research relative to their replacements. IE, even if the US government destroys $10b of current industry RnD spending, and then spends $15b on AI research, this is way less effective at pushing AGI capabilities.
B. Investment in AI research happens in large part due to expectation of outsized profits. Destroy expectation of outsized profits via draconian anti innovation/anti market regulation or just by tacking on massive regulatory burdens (which the US/UK/EU governments are very capable of doing) is enough to curb research interest in this area significantly.
C. There’s no real pressure from Chinese AI efforts. IE, delaying current AGI progress in the US/UK by 3 years just actually delays AGI by 3 years. More generally, there aren’t other relevant players besides big, well known US/UK labs.
(I don’t find 2 super plausible myself, so I don’t have a great inside view of this. I am trying to understand this view better by talking to said academics. In particular, even if C is true (IE China not an AI threat), the US federal government certainly doesn’t believe this and is very hawkish vs China + very invested in throwing money at, or at least not hindering, tech research it believes is necessary for competition.)
As for 4, this is a view I hear a lot from EA policy people? e.g. we used to make stupid mistakes, we’re definitely not making them now; we used to just all be junior, now we have X and Y high ranking positions; and we did a bunch of experimentation and we figured out what messaging works relatively better. I think 4 would be a crux for me, personally—if our current efforts to influence government are as good as we can get, I think this route of influence is basically unviable. But I do believe that 4 is probably true to a large extent.
Are any of these cruxes for anyone?
My impression is that 2 and 4 are relatively cruxy for some people? Especially 2.
IE I’ve heard from some academics that the “natural” thing to do is to join with the AI ethics crowd/Social Justice crowd and try to get draconian anti tech/anti AI regulations passed. My guess is their inside view beliefs are some combination of:
A. Current tech companies are uniquely good at AI research relative to their replacements. IE, even if the US government destroys $10b of current industry RnD spending, and then spends $15b on AI research, this is way less effective at pushing AGI capabilities.
B. Investment in AI research happens in large part due to expectation of outsized profits. Destroy expectation of outsized profits via draconian anti innovation/anti market regulation or just by tacking on massive regulatory burdens (which the US/UK/EU governments are very capable of doing) is enough to curb research interest in this area significantly.
C. There’s no real pressure from Chinese AI efforts. IE, delaying current AGI progress in the US/UK by 3 years just actually delays AGI by 3 years. More generally, there aren’t other relevant players besides big, well known US/UK labs.
(I don’t find 2 super plausible myself, so I don’t have a great inside view of this. I am trying to understand this view better by talking to said academics. In particular, even if C is true (IE China not an AI threat), the US federal government certainly doesn’t believe this and is very hawkish vs China + very invested in throwing money at, or at least not hindering, tech research it believes is necessary for competition.)
As for 4, this is a view I hear a lot from EA policy people? e.g. we used to make stupid mistakes, we’re definitely not making them now; we used to just all be junior, now we have X and Y high ranking positions; and we did a bunch of experimentation and we figured out what messaging works relatively better. I think 4 would be a crux for me, personally—if our current efforts to influence government are as good as we can get, I think this route of influence is basically unviable. But I do believe that 4 is probably true to a large extent.